Pritzker Star Koolhaas Frets Over EU, Tops Giant Beijing Tower

By Farah Nayeri -
Nov 1, 2011

Rem Koolhaas has watched many a
building project fall through in the course of his career. One
he’d hate to see die is the construction of Europe.

The Dutch architect is no stranger to European integration.
He designed a flag for the European Union in 2001 -- a bar code
with a colored strip per country -- and was one of a dozen
figures mapping the EU’s future in a 2010 report. With leaders
battling to solve the sovereign debt crisis, the Continent, he
says, is experiencing “a very scary moment.”

Europe “is simply an incomplete machine: It’s limping,”
Koolhaas says in a London interview. “Unless the machine is
constructed the way it’s intended, it won’t work.”

The EU’s founders “left that model to the next generation
of leaders, but the next generation forgot to finish it,” he
says. Without tighter union, Europe “will disintegrate.”

Koolhaas, 66, is valued as much for his views as for his
designs. Winner of the 2000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, he just
completed a headquarters for NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd., and is
finishing his biggest building: the China Central Television
tower in Beijing. He also teaches at Harvard University, and is
pondering the future of the countryside.

“The typical architect is a control freak,” says the lanky
Dutchman, seated on a stool’s edge as if he were the
interviewer. “In this case, we surrendered control.”

Koolhaas wears a sharp metal-gray suit and long, pointy
shoes. Part of his outfit, he confirms, is by Prada -- whose
stores and catwalks he designs. He won’t say which part.

On the wall is a poster listing museum competitions he
lost, including London’s Tate Modern and New York’s Museum of
Modern Art. “This is not a whiny room,” he says. It shows
museums are “getting bigger and bigger” and soon will be “more
like small cities than individual buildings.” There are museums
in China, he says, that are eight times the size of Tate Modern.

Of his first London project, the Rothschild bank, he says
it’s “not a one-liner” but a building that “tries to embed
itself carefully in the intricacies of the city.”

He doesn’t mind the British habit of nicknaming buildings,
though that makes them one-liners. “It’s actually quite nice if
things are appropriated by the population at large,” Koolhaas
says.

Film Noir

He was born in bombed-out Rotterdam, son of a writer-critic
who “gave me a respect for the word,” and grandson of a
modernist architect. He lived as a boy in Jakarta. A
screenwriter at first, he co-wrote a film noir and penned an
unproduced script for soft-porn director Russ Meyer. After
dabbling in journalism, he switched to architecture in 1968.

OMA opened in London in 1975, with Koolhaas’s ex-student
Zaha Hadid an early recruit. Hadid was “a very independent and
massively talented person from the beginning,” he says of the
2004 Pritzker winner.

Koolhaas’s masterwork, the CCTV tower in Beijing -- which
he co-designed with Ole Scheeren -- is an arched, bowlegged
edifice whose legs are joined at the base. Started in 2004, it
is set to open fully in two years after fire ruined the second
building.

How does he deal with a country where democracy is a work
in progress? “I’m happy you use the term ‘work in progress,’
because I think that is the essence of China,” he says. “It’s
not a perfect situation, but what is important is that CCTV is
not directly an element of the state.”

The Western capitalist model is showing its own signs of
strain. “We put our confidence in a system which is irrational,
if not crazy and totally emotional,” he says. “It’s clear that
was an absurd and misplaced confidence.”

Koolhaas plans to spend the next year writing about the
countryside, which today is “not inhabited by the same people:
It’s based on hard labor, on imported labor, maintained by a
global cast.” In a Swiss field today, he says, you’ll see “three
Thai women in jeans.”